There may have been a problem with a manufacturing lot but my guess is it is a shipping/handling issue at the distribution end. I sell over ten thousand tandem slides per year and have never had a complaint about the tabs breaking off. Blum has a lifetime warranty on hardware and does a really good job of making sure you won't need to make use of it. However, the tandems in particular are not designed for a cross country trip with UPS. We USED to UPS some tandems on occasion, but UPS found a way to knock the delran bearings off far too regularly.

I don't think I would assign blame to UPS since the package arrived "dent free" and the order was quite well packaged. The plastic surround over the metal action is pretty thin in cross section around the metal. I have only experienced one failure in the first 3 sets of slides I installed but, the supplier indicated that they have had issues with that plastic tab and they they have communicated with Blum about it and that Blum was working on this issue. My supplier did send me a replacement immediately which saved my schedule and these slides are very nice and I will be using them again. I think that Blum is a quality manufacturer and that their designs are great and if they do the continuous improvement as I expect they will, I would not expect any future issues.

Jack

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I had the same exact thing happen again two days ago with another brand new pair of slides. If the guides are shipped nested in each other, front to back, and the adjustment tab is turned to a not-so-sweet spot, then it's almost inevitable that the adjuster will get sheared off. It looks to me like it is 100% a shipping problem. I'm pretty relieved to hear that Blum is aware of the problem and on the case.

Incidentally, I ordered these guides to repair a Rev-A-Shelf trash pullout that came with a Servo-drive unit. It belongs to my in-law's neighbor, so we were visiting this weekend and I offered to fix it. I have never installed one of these units and it turns out that it had botton-mount guides, so I could not do the swap. The installed guides still worked great, but the soft-close pistons had failed. I was able to slide the pistons out of the new (broken) guides and make the swap without removing the installed guides. I've never seen the soft-close mechanism fail before, but as I said, I've never installed a Servo-Drive system before. I kind of expect it to fail again. If it does, I will take the time to document it and get Blum to take care of warranty replacements.